


A Good Soldier

by flowersforgraves



Series: hc_bingo round 8 [23]
Category: Valor Series - Tanya Huff
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 01:38:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13284219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowersforgraves/pseuds/flowersforgraves
Summary: In which Hollice remembers.prompt: wild card (fire)





	A Good Soldier

I still see the blaze when I close my eyes.

I still smell charred flesh when I sit down with my rations. 

I still hear the screams when I try to sleep.

Haysole was a good soldier. Yeah, yeah, I know. He got promoted and then busted back down more times than you could count, but that doesn’t make him a bad guy. Hell, it doesn’t even make him a bad soldier.

Let me clarify that. He was a good person. He meant a lot to a lot of people. He had hopes and dreams and ambitions. He knew when it was important to follow orders, and he knew when it was important to disobey them. That’s a pretty rare quality in a foot soldier, and I thought it was valuable. So did Gunny, I guess, because otherwise she wouldn’t have given him so many shots at getting things right.

The fire Haysole died in… I get nightmares, a lot. Sometimes about things that have already happened, like the fire. Sometimes about things that I didn’t see, like Glicksohn’s death. Sometimes about things that haven’t happened, and might not happen at all. I don’t like any of them, but it’s the ones where I can see faces that I hate most of all.

Tonight’s nightmare features Haysole screaming as he’s engulfed in flames. I didn’t actually see him die, which on the one hand is a good thing, but on the other I wish I’d known exactly what happened so my brain would stop making up horrific scenes. But for better or worse, I don’t have that in my head.

I miss him. The last thing we have of him is his masker, melted a little from the heat of the blaze. Gunny picked it up, afterward. He’d thrown it across the room. I mean, it was what he wanted, right? Dying with a masker on was an awful thought for him. Almost as bad as dying with his legs tied down.

Funny how things work out, that it turns out his legs were busted at the end. Stubborn as he was, I almost expected him to survive that just so he could heal up and die on his own terms.

I keep running through endless scenarios where I do something, anything, that helps. Maybe I could have dragged him with me. Maybe I could have ignored his request, and died in there with him. I do outrank him -- _did_ outrank him, after all.

It always comes back around to the same thing, though. I couldn’t have saved him. I couldn’t have done anything, even if I’d known what was going to happen. I’m good, but I’m not that good.

The kicker is that it was a fukking _test_. The lizards just wanted to _test us_ and see how good we were. I want them to pay for what they did. But I can’t, so I just have to settle for mourning my fallen comrades.

But enough about Haysole. It’s time to mourn Glicksohn.


End file.
